"It took me a minute to understand that in the fashion world, there are no rules. It’s a lawless state.”
Credit: NYDailyNews.com
It’s Thursday, day one at New York Fashion Week, and I’m taking in the bedazzled mood at the Lincoln Center’s pop-up city. The expo-like arena is a mashup of Blade Runner futurism and trade show banality, with elite sponsor huts laying basically vacant. But scan your email confirmation at the entrance and voila, you're inside. There, you can pose next to a $100,000 Mercedes-Benz or get your hair "dry-styled"—primped, without shampooing. Pass yet another level of security and you may enter the inner circle, the theaters where the shows are performed. Inside this shrink-wrapped zone, contrary to urban myth, the runways are not raised, like an altar, but laid at the audience's level. Important-looking folks squish shoulder-to-shoulder on benches, doodling on notepads and iPhones, and feigning nonchalance as they side-eye one other. The lights dim, then rise to the beat of a synthed-out bass drum. From backstage come lithe, drone-like, mostly white women wearing square layers and expressions of glum passivity. Happiness is just gauche.
Credit: Pout Perfection
The Nicholas K presentation rocks a desert oasis chic—which ought to serve the buying orders well, as the outside temperature sits at 9 degrees and dropping. As I watch conspicuously young-looking women glide by, I wonder how the newly established Child Model Law is affecting the fashion houses this year at Fashion Week. In 2013, New York state passed the Child Model Law, providing minors working as fashion models the same labor protections as other child entertainers: school-night curfews, on-set hour limits, chaperones, tutors, and mandatory financial trusts.
Credit: Pout Perfection
Had the Child Model Law offered me protection when I was a teenage model, I might've avoided being photographed nude at 16, unknowingly pimped to Wall Streeters, groped countless times, or forced to work 16-plus-hour days as a minor. Will the fashion houses comply, or risk fines by using underage models on the runways, in booths, and at parties? Notoriety doesn't compel them to stop using children; perhaps a hit in their pocketbooks would. But why is fashion so intent on taking advantage of kids at all?
Later that night, I’m at an official Fashion Week kickoff party in the Meatpacking District chatting with a stocky writer named David. He used to work at a porn magazine, he tells me. They'd require the "girls," in his phrase, to provide two forms of ID proving their age. Copies of those IDs would then be clipped to negatives of their shoots. “Then all of those negatives," he says, "were kept in a fireproof safe with a large man hired to guard the safe—we were just waiting for the FBI to show up. When my ex-wife became a fashion designer, the first model she used for her lookbook was 15. Her mom drove her to the photo shoot. Well, when we blew up the photo that we had chosen to use for all of our sales material, you could see this girl’s nipple through the top. I said to my wife, ‘We’re going to jail. This is an underage girl topless. This is child pornography.’ And my wife laughed and said, ‘This is fashion.’
Credit: Daily Mail
"And she was right. It took me a minute to understand that in the fashion world, there are no rules. It’s a lawless state.”
I chug a Peroni and consider his analysis as Ash Ra Tempel kicks in too loudly over the sound system, swamping further conversation. A 21-year-old wannabe designer asks for my number and settles for my Instagram as a smooth let-down. Justin Bieber slips by in some red moto-getup. I take that as my cue to leave.
It is an interesting comparison my new pal makes, on the historic problem of fashion's view toward its labor force. As fashion resides under the banner of art, it’s easy to forget that the operative word in fashion is industry. Worldwide, corporations create and sell $2.5 trillion worth of clothes and textiles a year. Fashion's recent problems with rampant sexual assault allegations, child labor, and association with international human trafficking rings are indeed a lawless state in action.
Read more at The New Republic.